Contributed by Patrick Neal / The artist Libby Braden lives and works in an old East Village tenement apartment that recalls the austere bohemian enclaves of James Baldwin’s Another Country or Jonathan Larson’s Rent. Braden, who moved there in the early nineties, has embraced an essentially nocturnal existence. She logs onto the computer to begin her remote position as a financial administrator around midnight, finishing up with enough hours in the day to work on her drawing and painting before going to bed at around 4 PM. She is fully aware of parallels between the conventions of an ordinary office job and her own representational aesthetic. Both are grounded and populated, with ego, id, and superego mingling and overlapping in a circadian rhythm of awareness and unconsciousness.

















